(Photograph) - Bird call: the Moa (above) found its encounter with Homo Sapiens fatal, but Eric Buffetaut of the University of Paris 6 and Jean LeLoeuff of the Musee des Dinosaures believe that birds like them lived alongside even bigger predators, the dinosaurs.
The bird whose fossils they uncovered beneath the Languedoc wine country in France weighed about 140kg, and may have laid some of the eggs previously attributed to dinosaurs. Their finds throw doubt on the theory that birds evolved to fill ecological niches vacated as the dinosaurs became extinct.